It was Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith who said of writing "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." I thought the quote was charming, maybe slightly credible, when I first heard it. In reality, it is profoundly true.
When I first began this journey, I tried to remain inside myself. I was extremely selective about the people I informed about what I was doing. I didn't want people to know because I didn't want people to want to read what I was writing. Basically, I didn't want them in my head.
When you are writing a character-driven novel you need your characters to be real. And if your characters are going to be real, a lot of soul searching is inevitable. You have to step into your situations to try to learn what your new friends will say, how they will feel, how they react. Sometimes it comes naturally, like remembering what it was like to hold your child for the first time. But other times--well, other times require you to reach deep into yourself and pull out emotions and memories that you may have long since buried. Emotions and memories that cause pain once you rip them out.
Is it worth it, this cutting into yourself and opening old wounds? If I can take a slice of myself and effectively use it to breathe life into another being, then the answer is undeniably yes. And if that being is able to bring some sort of escape, enlightenment, or encouragement to someone else, I can even let people inside my head for a few hundred pages. After all, as E.L. Doctorow said, "writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
